Introduction

Abstract

‘What should and should not be described as war is no longer a question for academics alone, but an issue of possibly world-political importance’, the political scientist Herfried Münkler asserts (2005: 4). He explicitly refers to the date of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as a crucial watershed, but the question about the changed nature of war has been at the forefront of international relations theory since the mid-1990s, when the state of Yugoslavia collapsed into a series of terrible civil wars, and even earlier, 1991, at the time of the first Gulf War. War is conceived as an aberration only, when, in fact, it has become the status quo and the main force for the organisation of society. Drawing from the ever-increasing body of plays investigating this changed nature of war, this study explores how contemporary wars and conflicts are represented on stage and shows that with the change in warfare during the last twenty years, the representation of war on stage has also changed significantly.

War is a social activity.

(Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832)